small moments
by dragondark
Summary: [ The ink carves heat through his skin, but he does not go yet. ] Four drabbles, set after the events of the Half Blood Prince. [ Nightmares come in fractures, greenscaled coils winding through the cracks. ]


author's note: Four nonsensical small drabbles, because I wanted to. :D Mildly spoilerific for book six and - therefore - everything before that.

disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter - but you already knew that.

**small moments**

_-_

_i. Minerva_

She could not believe it when they brought him back, his skin thinned to parchment and translucent. As daylight must be, as a fire waning to ash, but Minerva has never been overly concerned with matters of a metaphor.

(Her wrists shake; her heart beats thick in her veins.)

And in the corners she is looking for dreams, turning herself around and around, a wildcat whirling, eyes wandering and blind and dark to all future things. She is old now, and no longer as beautiful as she once was - the woman, the girl, the child with her sharp-boned face and her flashing eyes. Perhaps she loved him in her daughter's, sister's, lover's way; perhaps she did not.

What matters is that he is gone.

She is leaning back on his old-furnished chair and looking at his portrait now, thinking no, he never would have worn his beard so, and the glimmer in his eye could never have been torn out with a smear, the brittle edges of a spell. She is speaking words to the portrait that the picture cannot answer, and his thousand words splinter in the face of her sudden resolution.

She is thinking: what a fool I have been, what a fool.

The wizarding world trusts a boy to save them, but Minerva remembers the age before the shadow of Voldemort, when all eyes turned to Dumbledore. Scars and green eyes are not enough to earn her trust, and never will be.

-

_ii. Portrait_

He has been awake for a great while by now - longer than he cares to admit. But his is a riot of memories smeared bright with glory and tragedy distorted. He does not remember beyond those facts painted into him, answers awaiting questions.

They crowd him terribly sometimes, asking for new words to be formed from the thoughts that were never his; does he know? has he forgotten?

He is not quite the man, the flesh, but some faint trace of shade remains - enough to hide the answer in silence: that there is no life beyond this frame; that there is no spell that will bring your answer back to life.

-

_iii. Harry_

At night he remembers, or dreams.

Nightmares come in fractures, green-scaled coils winding through the cracks. He sees faces through the shattering glass stamped with desire, people that he would have never dreamed about had they not been lost. Splinters of Cedric's face shown at the edges of the mirror, of London and Diagon Alley hooded darkly against the cracking luminosity of fire; torn faces shrieking - screaming, shouting, hissing without voice - of his name in the streets.

Sometimes they're worse: Ginny or Ron or Hermione saying his name with the same wide sharp eyes, the precise look he recognises because he's so certain that he'll see it one day etched into their charred corpses, their scattered songless bones.

He recalls: I have put aside childish things. Surely Dudley has never said that, nor Petunia, nor Vernon. Yet the memory of the words course in his veins, thick as blood or poison, and he thinks of them with the close distance of a nightmare.

He has put aside Hogwarts, put aside the monstrous strange thought of love - or something so close as to be blood - and all the comforts that Voldemort might have yet to strip away. But Ron and Hermione remain: Ron with his pale faith in what the future brings; Hermione with the crisp clarity of knowing what must be done. And it might be that all of their grim certainty makes him a little more sure, too, of what he needs to complete.

_-_

_iv. Draco_

The ink carves heat through his skin, but he does not go yet. Waiting, he chafes the blood back into his flesh, seeing bones thinned to shadows beneath the skin. (Mirrors lie long behind him, amidst memories of sneers and the triumphant whirl of green banners above him, before--)

He thinks of winter, of the brief cold fluttering fingers at his cheek that pass for affection; of anything but an old man dying alone on a tower because he was too stupid to look elsewhere for his justice.

It comes in flashes - between rattling against the stones, shouting spells that crack the bricks: the black rush like an ill omen behind him in that night, the light's glaze that blurred his pale face as it tumbled from the edge of a tower. He shucks another curse to the soil and watches earthworms writhe into snakes: red ones patterned with diamonds, snakes twisted of silver and gold, snakes thicker than his wrists the color of brilliant emeralds.

He casts _Levicorpus_! on the last, transforms them. In his rage he thickens the syllables, twists the speech. Their tails wrap together, shifting into a grotesque knot of rats tangled into fur matted the color of leaves; into jade statues frozen from motion; into splinters, finally, that he grinds into the earth as he walks on, stiffly.

There are things that he cannot remember, and things that he cannot forget, and he does not know which of the two bothers him the more.

-

-

**end**

-

feedback: constantly looked for and adored, though it's hard to see as to how you could find something to critique in a slight piece like this. Have at it, however!


End file.
